'Pain make man think. Thought make man wise. Wisdom make life endurable' : Sakini, in "The Tea House of the August Moon" by John Patrick, (1953)

Wednesday, May 16, 2018

Book review: Cultural Dementia

Cultural Dementia: By David Andress

Reviewed by Katrina Gulliver

This book reminded me
of Kurt Andersen’s Fantasyland — but where Andersen thinks
only Americans have lost their minds, David Andress thinks everyone has. I
can’t say I disagree, being a subscriber to the Hourly Outrage, also known as
Twitter. Andress refers to
Brexit, Donald Trump’s election and Marine Le Pen’s rise in French politics as
things that should have been ‘punchlines’, comparing those who voted for them
to dementia sufferers. And that’s just in the first couple of pages. So I’m
guessing that as a Leave voter, I’m not the intended audience — nor do I, as
someone with a PhD in history, fit into Andress’s analysis of uninformed and
delusional Brexit voters. Nonetheless, he’s right that things have been shaken
up.

He offers a neat sweep
of postwar history, and is right about the broader sense in which postwar
prosperity — particularly that experienced by the middle classes of Western
nations — was itself an aberration. Considering it the norm has been a major
problem in politics and economics for the past 20 years. But admitting that
lifetime employment and a generous welfare state were perhaps an economic blip
and not a reasonable expectation is a tough pill for many to swallow.

One element Andress
omits in this analysis is the changing role of women. Increased
participation of women (particularly middle-class women) in the workforce since
the 1970s actually helped our economy weather the shocks of the oil crisis and
deindustrialisation. That the women’s movement essentially bought us another
generation of prosperity is part of the equation, although it came at a cost
(two incomes are now required to afford a middle-class lifestyle in much of the
country). Moreover, Andress’s
broad overview could also apply to many post-industrial Western nations. In
singling out the US, France and the UK, he is forced to make awkward
comparisons... read more: